


a pin-light, bent

by lupinely



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen, but listen. the thing is that i love gandalf & gandalf loves frodo., i took...several liberties with this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 14:06:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16788430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lupinely/pseuds/lupinely
Summary: Nienna stood. “Come,” she said. “Let us talk. Whatever you decide to do next, your place is not here in these halls, you know that. And time passes swiftly for your friends even as we kneel here.” Her voice was wry. “Never before have I known you to kneel for so long, and say so little.”“I used to be prouder,” Olorín said. “And more foolish.”(Before being sent back to Middle Earth, Gandalf speaks to Nienna, Lady of Pity, who worries for his heart.)





	a pin-light, bent

**Author's Note:**

> (Of the liberties I took with this fic: Gandalf, as a Maiar, would not go to the Halls of Mandos upon his "death;" but maybe he would go there of his own choice, after wandering outside of thought and time and before Eru sent him back to Middle Earth, because there was someone in Aman who worried for him.
> 
> Title from the song "A Pin-light, Bent" by Joanna Newsom.)

When he came to the Halls of Mandos, she was there awaiting him and would not let him pass. He knelt before her because he did not have the strength left to stand, and because he was afraid to look at her face. She was much greater in stature than he, of course, but she in turn knelt beside him so that they would have been eye to eye, had he dared to look.

Nienna touched his forehead and said, “Olorín;” and so he remembered his name.

“I did the best that I could,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I do not know whether it will prove to be enough.” He thought suddenly, painfully, of Frodo, and of the enormity of the burden that he had allowed—nay, engineered—to be placed upon those small shoulders. Would anyone here understand why he had done so, why in his grief and love he had felt that choice to be the wisest, though even here, even now, the shame he felt for that choice was so all-consuming that it was as if that were what he had brought back to Aman, rather than his own soul?

I’m sorry, he wanted to say, but did not. Was he? Not to her. In realizing this, he found that he had the strength enough to look at her, and so he did.

Nienna’s face beneath her gray hood was tired. Her steel-gray hair was braided and bound over one shoulder, her eyes as dark as the halls in which they stood. Olorín realized the form he had taken when he walked Middle Earth resembled her very much, though aged, of course, and male. She smiled as if she knew what he was thinking, but her smile was sad. There was silence, and in the silence he found he could not think, so instead he waited: patient, enduring. Faithful.

“I asked Manwë to let me be the one to speak to you,” she said at last, after studying his face. “You’ve done well, Olorín.” She touched his chin, the contact like frost gathering, but the sensation was reassuring even as his heart turned over with disquiet. “But your work is not yet done.”

“Please,” he said before he could stop himself; on Middle Earth, among Men and Elves and Dwarves and Hobbits, he had been old and wise. Here, kneeling before the Lady of Mourning and held by the depths of her gaze, he felt young and stupid. “I can’t. I’ve done hurt, and caused harm, even when I tried to do good. I fear there is nothing more that I can do. Nothing at least that will not turn against me, or go awry.” This may have happened already. He could not know, now.

“That is true of us all,” the Lady said. “More so than you know.”

Olorín, still kneeling, wished for his staff to lean on. He had grown too used to it and felt now naked without it, and without the hat that he had used to distract attention from his eyes, which had sometimes, were he not careful, glowed like embers set to spark into flame. Who had commented on that to him before, warily, with a sort of awe? Elessar, he remembered. Of course. It had been Aragorn.

Would Aragorn ever forgive him for choosing the Balrog over Sauron? It had seemed right at the time: but the memory, though recent—and yet immeasurably distant, far away—was a haze of smoke and shadow. Pain and weariness. Weariness had won. In the end, he had simply been tired.

Nienna stood. “Come,” she said. “Let us talk. Whatever you decide to do next, your place is not here in these halls, you know that. And time passes swiftly for your friends even as we kneel here.” Her voice was wry. “Never before have I known you to kneel for so long, and say so little.”

“I used to be prouder,” Olorín said. “And more foolish.”

“Perhaps.” She put her hand on his shoulder, and strength returned to him, enough to stand. “Come, Grey Pilgrim,” she said, and now she was most certainly smiling, gentle and fond.

Olorín could not bear it. “Yes, lady,” he said, and followed her from death’s halls.

In the his early days in Middle Earth, he had watched and waited, content to follow Curumo’s limited instructions and wander here and there as bidden. Yet it did not take long for him to stray to his own paths. In the beginning, there had been more joy than there was fear, for Middle Earth was beautiful and strange and more vast than Olorín had expected, with more secrets and surprises to delight him than he could have imagined. Because it did delight him: the land itself, and its peoples, too, in a way he knew was not shared by the others of his order. Especially not by Curumo.

Yet that was why the five of them had been sent, after all. They each cared for different things and were the keepers of those things in their own fashions, and it was through this interrelation of strength and purpose that they would see to their communal ends.

But the order had fractured, and Olorín had not realized this schism for what it was at the time. Early they lost Alatar and Pallando to the lure of the East and whatever secrets might be found there; they lost Aiwendil to the care of birds and beasts, a task both noble yet secondary to their true purpose. And without realizing it, without knowing it, Olorín lost Curumo to the promise of the Ring itself.

So for a long time it had been Olorín alone walking along this path of purpose, though he had not known it. Alone as Frodo was now alone.

No; not quite. For Olorín had chosen his path when he had thought there had been others alongside him to bear its burden. Frodo, despite the company of the Fellowship and their later devotion, had chosen his path alone, and walked it alone, and known since the start that he must face its end alone, if he made it to that end at all.

Use not your shame as a cloak. Yet that was easier than what Olorín must do, which was to face it, to bear it, to forgive himself for it.

But there was pride, too, pride and a fierce, enduring love. Because he believed in Frodo. He had since the start, and he always would. He might not be able to ever make anyone else understand that belief, that wild strong love, but that would be because of a failure on his part to explain and on their part to understand, rather than because of any unworthiness of Frodo as the subject of such hope.

Ah, Frodo! Olorín thought of long summer days in the Shire spent smoking with Bilbo while Frodo, much younger then, though to Olorín it felt as mere days ago, just hours, ran with the other hobbit youths outside and shouted and laughed and sang. It was an evil fate, that this burden had fallen to him.

But not, Olorín thought, an erroneous one.

He and Nienna sat in one of Yavanna’s gardens, a place where Olorín had never before seen Nienna, nor ever heard of her venturing to. No doubt she had chosen this place because she thought it might comfort him, yet even she, for all of her calm interior silent strength, seemed to grow warm amidst all the greenery, like a plant growing slowly and steadily towards sunlight. She pushed her hood back from her hair and her eyes caught the light, her dark skin almost glowing. It did Olorín more good to look upon her, he found, than it did him to look upon even these fecund gardens of Yavanna.

He told her of the others, Alatar and Pallando, of whom he had not heard word nor seen sign in nearly one thousand years as measured upon Middle Earth. If this troubled Nienna, she said nothing, merely sat silent as he then told her of Aiwendil and how he had aided Olorín against the Shadow in Dol Guldur, and later been deceived by Curumo just as Olorín had been.

“I know not the moment when Curumo fell,” he said. The telling of this was painful, the hurt and betrayal of it mixing with his already-burdensome shame. He should have known, he could have known. He should not have needed to know it. Curumo should not have fallen. In one stroke Olorín had been left alone to face the threat that Sauron posed, for Aiwendil was too concerned with bird and beast and root and tree to do any more than follow any instructions Olorín might give him, and even then he might simply forget them because his priorities were elsewhere. In a way, he too had fallen. And as for Alatar and Pallando—why, they might even also be dead.

“They aren’t,” Nienna said, reading his thoughts. “Though I know not where they are, nor to what purpose their minds and hearts now work towards. Oftentimes the five of you were beyond our sight, shrouded in the darkness that now lies heavy upon Middle Earth. Those two have been hidden from our sight for nearly as long as they have been from yours.” She was silent a moment, and Olorín sensed now that she was troubled, deeply so, but not for those two of the Istari. Rather her worry was for him.

“I did my best to watch over you,” she said. “We are not supposed to, not too closely. Of course some of us are more prone to disobeying this directive than others....” She trailed off for a moment. As far as Olorín knew, watching Middle Earth was something Nienna only ever did infrequently, because the chance of being caught up in a world’s worth of grief and pain was very great. “Yet after Curumo’s fall, you too were hidden from me.” Another pause. “I worried.”

Olorín, touched, embarrassed, said, “Why?”

“I told Manwë that you should be sent. Varda agreed...but it was my idea, my decision. I felt responsible.”

Olorín closed his hands on empty air, wishing once more for his staff. For something solid, something mundane and immanent and knowable. “I am sorry, then, for failing you.” For that was what this must be about, after all. He had not succeeded, and now Nienna was responsible for his failure.

She frowned, her demeanor and mood changing as swiftly as a cloud might move to cover the full Moon. “You have not failed me. You said you cannot go back because your actions brought harm even when you tried to prevent it. You feel responsible for the hurts of the world. As do I.” She sighed, and put out one hand to a flower, bright blue and stunning. It leaned into her touch. “I am responsible for you. And I did you harm in sending you. I knew that you did not want to go, or that at least you resisted the summons. And now you wish not to go back, but rather to rest here instead, in the land that is your home, and I must convince you to return.”

Olorín said nothing. Of course. His task was not yet done. He had begged Manwë, lifetimes ago, not to send him, because he had been afraid. Of failing, of doing harm, of creating rather than righting wrongs. Did that fear remain? Was he still the same as he had been then, so long ago? Had he learned nothing?

“My assent is not needed, if I have already been chosen to return,” he said at last.

“You are right,” Nienna said. “We both know very well that our fates are not always ours to choose. But it would ease my heart and mind to know that you still found purpose, and hope, in your quest.”

“Hope?” He considered the trees, taller than any he had seen in his time in Middle Earth and more beautiful, less comforting. “Perhaps,” he said. A fool’s hope.

If he returned, there was work that he might do: battles to fight, strongholds to defend, wisdom to impart. But there was nothing now, nothing, that he could do for Frodo. That piece had been set into motion, and it was beyond his farthest reach. It was upon that piece that the entirety of the conflict hinged, and it was that piece that he had knowingly surrendered from his control as early as the Council of Elrond. Before that, really; he had sat in a Hobbit hole in the Shire months earlier and discussed the fate of the world over breakfast with a little Hobbit, and during the course of that conversation Frodo had become a Ringbearer and his fate been set into motion. Olorín’s course after that had only been to guide Frodo, and even then not to the very end: he had known then that he would never set foot in Orodruin, that Mountain of Fire.

But Frodo would. Or he would die in the attempt. And nothing, no action that Olorín might take, could aid Frodo now. He was, as far as Olorín knew, alone; if not yet then surely soon, because the Fellowship had begun fracturing from within as soon as it had formed—just as the order of Istari had—and Frodo would have seen that.

Olorín had known that this would be Frodo’s path: lonely, wearying, treacherous, with no certainty of anything but pain and grief at its end. And still he had set Frodo upon this road; or at the very least, had not warned him from it.

Had that been wisdom? Or had it been cowardice? He could not answer Nienna, could not comfort her, until he knew for certain.

And yet I cannot ever know, he thought, unless I go back.

“You are hurt,” Nienna said softly, watching him.

Olorín held out his empty hands. “I wrestled with a Balrog,” he said. “I did not truly prevail.”

“You are hurt in soul,” she said, and took his empty hands in hers. “Your physical form will be returned to you when you go back, and your powers—more than you had, even. You will be stronger now, in that sense. Yet I fear for your heart, Olorín.”

His heart? Yet surely his was not the heart now most in peril. He thought of his friends whom he had known—of Aragorn, and whether he would ever be set upon the throne in Minas Tirith, or if the White City would wither and fade even as Boromir had feared; he thought of Galadriel in Lothlórien, stern, watchful, proud, impatient. Of mallorn trees, sundered and burned. Of Legolas and Gimli and their homes in Mirkwood and Erebor, which had only so recently escaped the Shadow’s influence themselves. Elrond in Rivendell, the last lonely house. And he thought of Samwise, simple-couraged, and Merry and Pippin, far from home, foolish and laudable for their innocent trust and love. The Shire, green, low-hilled, tranquil, faced with a storm for which its inhabitants would have no name.

And of course, he thought of Frodo. Always of Frodo. And yet—if Frodo lived, if he succeeded, if the Ring were destroyed—if, if, _if_....

If those things came to pass—then did not Olorín owe, to Frodo more than anyone else, the chance for explanation? For blame? For comfort?

For that alone, for whatever chance might exist for him to bring Frodo peace, and not pain, he would return to Middle Earth a hundred times. A thousand. However many times it took until that task was done.

To Nienna, his Lady of Pity, Olorín finally said, “My heart will look after itself. There are other hearts, now, to which I must yet tend.”


End file.
